or rather trying to read it for the second time and I’m wondering, how did this book ever get published? And was the editor drunk? I’m on like page 261 of 1079. Didn’t anyone ever tell this guy that you don’t start sentences with “And but so…”? Didn’t anyone ever tell him that you don’t put FOOTNOTES in a f*ing NOVEL? Yes, FOOTNOTES, 388 of them no less. That you don’t relabel years things like “Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar” and “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment” and then not tell the reader what order they come in until PAGE 223.
Sorry about the style of this post but that’s what reading this book makes you write like.
Anyway, so like but I’m wondering if anyone can tell me whether it’s going to be worth my time hacking my way through this sometimes hilarious sometimes tediously long-winded piece of I don’t know what, or whether I should cut my losses and go re-read Lord of the Rings for the 245th (approx.) time.
“Infinite Jest” basically exists to make fun of the modern american novel, as far as I’m concerned, and to ridicule the reader for actually reading the entire thing. This would be a funny, “Ulysses”-sized stunt if DFW had actually written anything else worthwhile.
I can understand most of the criticisms of this book. It takes a longer to start making sense than most books take to be done, and there is the impression that the manuscript was never left alone in a room with an editor. I still think it’s excellent. I once read a description of it that said it was “maximalism at its finest”. I like the footnotes, some of which have their own footnotes. And I think there’s a certain brilliance in that the book can be so expansive, and cover so much, and still be so very frustrating in the things it leaves out.
Strange you should mention that. In the “What if The Lord of the Rings had been written by somebody else” thread, I did a passage in the style of David Foster Wallace.
Infinite Jest took me over a year to finish reading (obviously I wasn’t reading it every day) and I’m tempted to do it again. I’d call myself a David Foster Wallace fan but honestly there’s some of his stuff I can’t stick with all the way through. But I finished Infinite Jest (I think it helped that, at the time, I was living in the same city where most of the book takes place)
There’s a point at which the book starts to feel like the air around you, and part of it is that the characters seem to spend a lot of time dwelling on the same incredibly commonplace things that we may only rarely let our minds drift to, but are definitely real, so it has the effect of letting the world in the novel, with its oddities (“Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment”) somehow blend in with the world outside the book.
Fair warning though: you may suddenly become obsessed with the story as soon as you’re done with it. Like Lord of The Rings, its size gives you a lot to want to revisit.
I’ve decided that I’m a much bigger fan of DFW’s non-fiction than his fiction. In the future, I will know better than to read things like Infinite Jest.
The footnotes were my favorite part, however. If I ever decide to read it again (like say, if I’m stranded on a desert island with nothing but Infinite Jest to read), I think I might just read the footnotes.
At the same time, I don’t have a lot of criticism for him, his fiction, or his craftsmanship. I think he makes very deliberate, consistent stylistic choices, and in theory I appreciate the fact that he doesn’t write to the lowest common denominator. That said, those stylistic choices aren’t really my personal cup of tea.
To answer the question in the OP, I would say, in my very humble opinion, if you are at 261 and the book hasn’t hooked you, it very well might not. It doesn’t have much variation in tone, style, or mood, so nothing about the writing is going to change between now and the end of the book. Of course, one benefit of finishing it is that you can be one of those people who bases his criticism of it on having read the entire book.
As I feel moved to say something positive about DFW, I give a hearty recommendation to his collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, as well as a recommendation for Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, with the qualifier that it’s a good book for people who already like higher math, and perhaps not so much for people who don’t. Both have footnotes.
I bought the book b/c DFW was teaching at my university - I was actually signed up to take one of his classes but a scheduling conflict caused me to drop it. I met him a few times (I was an English major) at departmental functions and figured from our (admittedly quite limited) interaction that I would enjoy ‘Infinite Jest.’
Boy was I wrong. I tried, and tried, and tried to get through it and I just couldn’t. I kinda beat myself up over it, thinking maybe I just wasn’t ‘getting it.’ Now I think of it as an unneccesarily difficult piece of work, impossible to get through just for the sake of being impossible to get through. Fun!
Infinite Jest is the finest novel I have ever read, bar none. Smart as hell, wonderful characters, tremendously playful form, and gorgeously human. To each his own, of course, but anyone who thinks otherwise is wrong.
The adulation shown to David Foster Wallace perfectly exemplifies the reasons I left academia. I don’t think literary fiction has to be simple, but his ceaseless, over-the-top verbosity wore thinner and thinner until it became transparently showing off. It’s like Yngwie Malmsteen with a word processor; Yngwie plays incredibly fast, but fast is all he’s got. After a few minutes I’m ready for some modulation, some melody, some contrast, some humanity.
DFW is a one-trick pony; it’s a pretty good trick, but I’ve seen it over and over and over, from him and others. It’s like that guy at the party who tells great stories, but he tells them over and over, louder and louder, all night without stopping. Pretty soon you just want him to shut up, great stories notwithstanding.
I actually thought the footnotes and other postmodern tricks were the best part of what I managed to get through (about 50 pages). For me, though, it lacked what I needed by way of characterization and plot to stick with it.
It probably didn’t help that I couldn’t care less about tennis…
I found it much easier to read the second and third times around (when I wasn’t bringing a dictionary along for the ride, and had annotated the margins with definitions). I took about five sheets of note paper and every time a character was referenced, I’d make a note of it under their entry, e.g. “Mildred Bonk born YWTF, has daughter Harriet Bonk-Green (p. 99), theme: paralyzing beauty (p. 73), etc.” so that I sort of understand why the character is even mentioned and what it means that they’ve showed up just then.
The themes (addiction, entertainment, freedom, and beauty/ugliness) are all there and explained in nearly-tedious detail by Steeply and Marathe. Anyone who doesn’t picture them as Waldorf and Statler, or a Greek Chorus, isn’t really getting the point. The “war” and the attempt to use The Work as a weapon are at most just a catalyst for the real story.
The plot is exquisite and byzantine and amazing and the best reason to read the book. Each time you read it, you’ll get just a little bit more of the Big Picture of what’s going on. For example, just re-reading the first chapter once you’ve finished the book makes the whole thing come together much better. Questions like “Where did Pemulis’ supply of DMZ come from?” and “How did Hal end up overdosing on DMZ?” become clearer and clearer on each subsequent read. It would be an arduous but amazing task to cross-reference the book with an index allowing you to read it in chronological order; until someone does that, you need to read it at least twice to even get the whole plot!
The style is sort of laughable, because it is so hideously self-referential. At one point, Joelle van Dyne even ponders:
If I had a dime for every time they talked about The Work and what they said about it also applied to the text itself, I’d almost be able to buy a new copy to replace the worn-out one I have.
While I admire the work as a technical accomplishment, if I were his professor it would get points taken off for going overboard on the big words. Giant-ass vocabulary is only to be tolerated from inside Joelle van Dyne’s or Hal’s point of view. To give Mario’s POV the same situational awareness as Hal’s betrays the writer’s sympathy with Hal to the point of casting the author as an omniscient filmmaker with a prodigious vocabulary. Pee Ess, the big SAT-words also smack of self-congratulation or even masturbation.
And yeah, I’m pretty much resigned to taking a big steaming crap on any piece of art that implies that I’m “not supposed to get it,” or a thousand times worse, claims that it is Art specifically because it’s “hard to get.” I still love Infinite Jest despite the deliberate barriers to entry, but am willing to admit that my love may be congruent with that of a hazed frat pledge for his brothers.
Yeah, you just said it better than I did… that’s the kind of work that I prefer not to read. If your idea of art is making a labyrinth and deliberately sealing off the exit, then you clearly have an over-inflated idea of how hard your audience should work to “get” your message; that is, you probably over-value the importance of what the work is trying to say.
With that in mind, however, I enjoyed Foucault’s Pendulum (no clear message as far as I could tell) and I’m part way through Pynchon’s V., which is tough. I keep coming back to Gravity’s Rainbow and getting about 100 pages in and mumbling “fuggit, he’s not writing a novel – he’s jerking me around.” DFW is a hundred times more readable than Pynchon because when he’s rambling, at least he’s giving you background, context, details.
Infinite Jest contains one of the best prose descriptions of suicidal ideation I’ve ever read. The cast is too large. It’s impractical for all but the most devoted DFW fan.
The Broom of the System is a lot more accessible, with fewer offputting displays of literary self-consciousness. I find that people who enjoyed A Confederacy of Dunces really like it.
Mixed reviews - about what I expected. Thanks, folks! At least some of you think it’s worth the effort.
'Cause for me, that’s the whole question, not how much effort it is, but is the payoff worth it. Pynchon is a case in point: I’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow, V., and Mason-Dixon. I though GR was worth the effort, V. wasn’t, and I’m still not sure about MD. I can’t tell you why I feel that way, exactly. But GR seemed to come to some kind of conclusion that made it more than just random scribbling, while V. didn’t. Or, if it did, I didn’t get it.
Anyway, thanks for the input and I’ll probably keep at it, at least for a while.
Infinite Jest is one of my favorite books. I usually go back and read it once a year, and I think I get more out of it every time. I’m drawn to certain storylines more than others: Hal and the tennis academy, of course (the Eschaton debacle is one of the most hilarious things ever written); and Gately and Ennet House. Hal Incandenza is an amazingly realized character, and to go back and reread the first bit after knowing how he got there is rather heartbreaking.
I agree that Wallace’s nonfiction is really worth reading, even if you don’t like his fiction. He recently wrote a piece on lobsters in Gourmet that I never expected to see in that publication.
Chalk me up as another fan of The Broom of the System - heck I have a signed 1st edition of it…
Having said that, I very much agree with most people’s complaints about DFW and the state of modern literary fiction today. Franzen’s Corrections is a classic example - he goes out of his way to talk about a return to characters, plot and development of both, but left me with a sense of smirkiness, obtuseness and meta-analysis of situation I would never have found in the best classic prose. Care enough to commit passionately to the characters and where they go, dammit!
Freejooky - your link looks really interesting. Can you tell us more about it? Is there a hardcopy magazine to subscribe to or specific online blogs/zines you’d recommend we check out associated with it? I.e., how should a newbie best get familiar with it?
The vocabulary makes more sense if you consider (as I concluded after my second reading) that Hal is the narrator for most or all of the book.
As for how Hal got dosed with the DMZ, that was never entirely clear to me. My working hypothesis is: Apparently, he was dosed by Pemulis. My guess as to the mechanism was the toothbrush, since that’s the only way I spotted that he could have it slipped to him.
Did you see something more specific that I missed? I admit, it’s been four or five years since I last read the book.
I agree with your hypothesis, although I suppose it’s possible that someone other than Pemulis could have been responsible; doesn’t he only discover that the DMZ is missing?
I’ve only read it once, about 6 years ago. I want to read it again, now that I live in Boston, but it’s a daunting prospect.
Regarding Hal’s fate:
Is it totally established that Hal gets dosed with the DMZ? I’ve looked back through some passages, and aren’t there references to Hal’s father creating The Entertainment to get his son to loosen up and be more expressive; and also to Hal and Don Gately going to the Great Concavity to dig it up?
And even if the vocabulary does require a little extra effort, I tip my cap to anybody who can coin a phrase like “howling fantods”.
I think we can rule out The Entertainment because its victims all just starve themselves to death; they don’t keep on living in an incoherent state. Heck, they don’t even bother. The DMZ is a likely but not certain cause for Hal’s condition, and how Hal would have taken it is even less certain. Personally, I think Hal took it off-page out of desperation from the marijuana withdrawal. But there’s a DFW messageboard (on a Web site that calls itself “the howling fantods” where one of the most popular theories is tha Hal created it in his own gut somehow from whatever was left inside him from the mold he ate when he was young (this theory is based on the similar descriptions between the DMZ and the mold – mold that has to grow on top of other mold)). Of course, the missing DMZ at the end could be unrelated and Hal could just be a victim of one of the bizarre torture methods employed by the Wheelchair Assassins.
God, what a book. Let me also add that it kind of helps to have read DFW’s essay about being caught in a tornado during a tennis match in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again before reading IJ. It somehow makes the scenes at Enfield Tennis Academy seem a bit more personal.